STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ is an RPG set 4,000 years before the events of New Hope. We play here as a Republic soldier who, along with discovering his force potential, will also discover his own complicated past. I am reviewing this game, after finishing both parts of the KOTOR series, so there may be comparisons. I went through the game in the original version, so I didn't make my life easier by installing mods ( even for resolution ).
As this game is almost 20 years old, I will describe that I consider to be important. Starting off, the beginning of the game, and the starting location is a spaceship and a large Ekumenopolis (city-planet). But what I like most about this prologue is that we're not a powerful Jedi or Sith, we're just an ordinary person, so we only use grenades, blasters, and vibroswords. This is a nice change from other Star Wars games. The general idea of the game is that the Republic is at war with the Sith, led by the Dark Lord and a former war hero; Darth Malak, who had previously killed his master; Darth Revan. Or at least that's the Jedi's version of the story. It's an interesting concept because it's more of a civil war than a conflict between empires like in SWTOR, so we can meet old Republic soldiers in the ranks of the Sith. A big part of the game is discovering our potential in the Force, which gives us the opportunity to train on Dantooine to become a Jedi. Even though it's a short segment of the game, I thought it was important because the concept of playing a game where we learn in Jedi academy is very interesting, and personally, I would like to get a game like Hogwarts Legacy, only in the Star Wars universe, which would give us the opportunity to learn at the Jedi and Sith academies. I think such a game would be a great success, and a lot of fun. But getting back to the main thread, it's our job to find maps to the Sith main base, which will take us across the many movie planets and beyond, each with original stories to offer. Probably the most interesting planet is Korriban (the home planet of the Sith) because we have so much opportunities to study at the academy, and funnily enough, we learn so much more philosophy and interesting, ancient history than on Dantooine with the Jedi, and it's just amazing. However, we also have dark and light side mechanics here. Each of our decisions in the dialogues has different consequences, and the world around us will react to them (the corruption of the dark side can even be seen on our face). This has no great consequences, and the decision at the very end of the game, whether we side with the Sith or the Jedi, remains the same. To be honest, the fact that this game allows us to completely go to the dark side, become the Dark Lord of the Sith and murder Jedi makes it the best Star Wars game in terms of story. As for our companions, they're all great, and they add a lot of life to the world/main plot.
Starting from the beginning, i.e. from the character creator. We have some options here, but personally I think they are a bit few. When it comes to appearance, we choose a face from a few already available, and they are not the best, especially since our hero during fights and short comments (because we are mute in dialogues) sounds a bit too young for my taste, and speaking of skill points , powers and attributes, that's enough of them here, although it's a bit hard to experiment here due to the not very balanced system of gaining experience with the class skills already selected for us. We now move on to combat, and it's a very outdated system because it's a turn-based system where we choose a hero and companions and give them orders, then all we do is sit and watch until the fight is over. It also doesn't help that the animations are very meh. Blaster duels are as thrilling as mushroom picking, and vibrosword/lightsaber duels, although they have their own animations, are wooden, sometimes too slow, and the blades often don't even touch each other, so it looks more like a mime duel. Power skills aren't very flashy, but there are a lot of them, so there's some variety here. The maps we are moving through are varied because, as I said, we are moving on many planets here. However, these are quite large maps, divided by zone loading screens, and with the slow movement of the character, walking from one point to another is torture, especially since the game does not have such a thing as markers (only journal entries), so you have to figure everything out by yourself. But apart from that, the locations are really interesting, and the equipment we find in them is not very diverse, but there is enough of it to be satisfied. However, what bothers me in the game are the strange decisions made by the developers. To give examples: on Kashyyk in the Shadowlands there are monkeys that make noise (and they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ don't stop), the most annoying sound in the history of games, on Tatooine we are molested by desert people who attack us every now and then, in space we move so slowly that in the meantime, I could go and make myself dinner, and in the final location, there are whole swarms of enemies literally thrown at us from the air, and it drags on terribly. It also doesn't help that our character loves to get stuck on every object. And one more thing, but this is a subjective opinion. I know there are a lot of races and languages in Star Wars, but the amount of "languages" that the characters speak is unpleasant, we often see dialogues and cutscenes where aliens growl at each other, groan, etc, and it's really hard to focus on the dialogue, especially that these languages are extremely painful to the ears, even more so when we hear the same thing for the hundredth time, and speaking of repetition, the disadvantage of this game is also the fact that the characters tend to repeat themselves, and explain unnecessary things.
Like I said, it's an old game. It works on very low resolutions, it broke my save game once, and to be honest, when it comes to graphics and effects, it's bad. For some reason, the game also has graphical bugs and I personally had to turn off the grass to fix it, not to mention that in some locations the game, despite its age, simply runs terribly on higher graphics settings. The music is not typical movie music, but it keeps a high level. The voice actors did a very good job, but I think in some scenes they didn't quite know what they were reading, so the intonation is a bit weird at times.
An amazing game with the best storyline in the Star Wars universe. It's a classic, and despite the outdated gameplay and technical issues, it's a great product that gives the player a lot of amazing fun. I hope the Remake will keep the high standard (if it ever comes out).
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